August 31, 2004:

Burning hot into the home stretch of writing
Degunking Email, Spam, and Viruses, and about all I can summon
the energy to do tonight before bed is present a few odd lots to close
out August:

Just a few minutes ago, we watched "Father of the Pride,"
a new animated funny animals weekly half-hour TV series for adults (not
kids!) by the same team that did the Shrek movies. It was a step
away from the Nickelodeon-style limited animation kids have come to
see as standard, and while it didn't have the precision that Shrek
had (how could it?) the animation was very nice. The problem was that
the writing was completely appalling and gratuitously crude, with only
a couple of smiles the entire time, and no good laughs. ("For adults"
appears to mean that sex jokes substitute for wit and cleverness.) Skip
it.

Frank Glover sent me a link to a
nice article on the progress of NASA's X43A unmanned scramjet. Guinness
will book its Mach 6.83 flight on March 27 of this year as a new world's
record for air-breathing aircraft. Remarkably, this is faster than the
venerable X15 did in the mid-1960s with pure rockets. The X43A will
fly again in October, and possibly break Mach 10. My main question:
Without a human being at the controls, can the public really care enough
to take this promising technology from experimental to production?

Frank O'Grady sent me a pointer to a
new article by David Brooks in the NY Times, offering some
clues on how the Republican Party might reinvent itself, basically by
following the example of (egad) Ahnold in California. In the past couple
of months I've heard more and more about the "radical middle"
or "muscular middle," and how the party that steps in to claim
it (basically by bitch-slapping its screaming fringes senseless) will
rule America. The true divide in American politics is not about liberal
versus conservative but center versus edges. This seems obvious to me,
but Brooks doesn't seem quite convinced. Worth reading. (You have to
register at the NYT to read it, but I've not seen any downside to that.)

All for now. More in a coupla days. I'm trying to average 2,000 words a
day, and that's harder than it sounds.

August 28, 2004:

I had an interesting "aha! Insight!"
last night, while reading yet another breathless description of the how
the Singularity is not
only a clever fictional device (the brainchild of the formidable Vernor
Vinge) but a real thing, and it will happen by 2030. I leaned back
in my chair, and it hit me:

The Singularity is the apocalypse of the Cult of Progress!

An "apocalypse" is a literary type, very common in religion
writings. It's a revenge fantasy concocted by the losers in any serious
conflict. The most famous, of course, is the Apocalypse of St. John the
Divine, better known to most of us as Revelation. After the Roman Empire
utterly stomped the Hebrew nation in the Jewish Wars of AD 66-70, the
Jews gathered their grumbles together into a magnificent mythic account
of how, with God's help, they would have the last word and pave the Romans
over. (Actually, it worked. We now have the State of Israel, and haven't
seen the Roman Empire for almost 1500 years...)

The "Left Behind" apocalyptic literature you buy at Wal-Mart
today is another revenge fantasy: That of the 19th century Millerites,
whose current descendents, the Dispensational Premillennialists, are losing
the Culture Wars in a big way, and can't wait for God to whisk them all
up to heaven, from which they can look down and eat barbecued ribs while
watching the rest of us sinners get torn to shreds by, well, all those
monsters from Revelation.

This Singularity thing is a defiant "We're right and just you wait
and see!" tantrum, thrown by the last holdouts of the Cult of Progress.
This isn't an explicit movement so much as a historical trend: From about
1850 to 1970, the Zeitgeist in the West was faith in continuous upward
progress in both the social and scientific realms. Science, technology,
and an enlightened social outlook would allow us to eliminate poverty,
hate, war, and anything else that nipped at our heels, and in doing so
we would become a kinder, gentler, more educated and open-minded species.

We did make a great deal of progress in those 120 years. The problem
is that many among us elevated progress to a sort of deity whose rule
was obvious, inevitable, and unending. There were no limits to what we
could imagine, and hence to what we could accomplish. The various convulsions
that began in the mid-1960s shook the Cult of Progress to its core. And
although we're still making progress in some areas, it's nothing like
what we managed from 1850 to 1950.

This bothers the progress partisans, and the Singularity is their revenge
fantasy: "By 2030, accelerating technological progress will change
the world so completely that no one from before that time will recognize
the world after that time." In other words, Progress remains on the
throne of heaven, and the Singularity will be the proof of its reign,
just as the Rapture will be the proof of God's favor granted to the Dispensational
Premillennialists.

I won't recap my detailed objections to the Singularity here. (I need
to write my white paper entitled "The Singularity Considered Stupid.")
One of my simpler tests: Imagine yourself in 1950. Which year would be
more familiar to you from that standpoint: 1900, or 2000? In 1950 we had
television, telephones, many kinds of radio, electronic record players,
consumer-class automobiles, jet aircraft, computers, nuclear weapons,
and antibiotics. In 1900 we had none of these things. Our lives are richer
and busier now than in 1950, but the shapes of our lives are pretty
much the same, especially compared to the shapes of American lives prior
to 1900. We invented much more between 1900 and 1950 than between
1950 and 2000. Most of what we've done since 1950 has been refinement,
not genuine innovation in the concepts that shape our lives. A cordless
telephone is still a telephone, and while a 2004 Corvette goes faster
than a Model A, it's still a horseless carriage.

One can certainly argue this point at length, and as I said, I intend
to write that argument someday. In the meantime, well, the Millerites
have been waiting for the Rapture since the mid-1840s, and I think the
Singularity gang will be waiting for some of their touchstone advances
for a very long time. Uploading, in particular, is an almost inexplicable
Extropian wet dream that I feel has a close analogy to the Raptureand
is just as likely to occur. Just as the Millerites can't wait to be shed
of this sinful flesh, so the Singularity partisans can't wait to be shed
of these slow, headache-prone brains.

I'll still be here in 2030, with any luck at all. (I'll only be 78.) I expect
America of 2030 to look a great deal like America of 2004. My prediction
as to when the Singularity will arrive: Always precisely 25 years in
the future, whether the present be now or 2030. That's when the Cult
of Progress will triumph and get its revenge on us scurvy realists. Just
wait and see!

August 27, 2004:

Our
friends Harry Gante and his staff at MITP
Germany in Bonn have gotten the first of (we hope) several Degunking
series translations into print. "Windows entrümpeln" translates
to "Windows Clean-Out", and that's probably as good as you'll
get in another language.

I found it interesting that they don't capitalize all major words in
a book title, as we do here. But apart from cultural differences like
that, the book is amazingly like the English-language edition, in its
fonts, page design, graphics, and overall appearance. How good the German
is, well, that's not something I can tell you, but I like the tagline
to the left of the model's head on the cover: "Zeit, Geld, und Nerven
sparen..." (Save time, money, and sanity...)

Our success with the first Degunking book has had its effects on the subsequent
titles: Just yesterday we received an order from one of the two major retail
chains for 3,000 copies of Degunking Email, Spam, and Viruses. Ulp.
I guess that means I better hit the keys here and finish the damned thing.
I finished a chapter just before lunch, and that leaves four chapters to
go. Should be done by September 21. Other projects are piling up. This one
had better be done soon.

August 26, 2004:

Wrote almost 4,000 words on Degunking Email
today, and I'm pretty drained, so let me put a few odd lots in front of
you instead of any extended essays:

The Roman Catholic Church continues to put their foot in it, this
time in a particularly cruel way. A young girl made her First Holy Communion
with a consecrated rice wafer, because she has a severe case of Celiac's
Disease, and even a small amount of wheat could kill her. A sympathetic
local priest bent the rules for her, but when the bishop of her diocese
found out, he didn't just scold the priest, but also
invalidated the little girl's reception of the sacrament. The bishop
has apparently forgotten Mark 9:42, not to mention Mark 10:13-16. He
might as well get himself fitted for his millstone now and save God
some trouble later on.

Pete Albrecht sent me a pointer to SpoofStick,
a free plug-in for Firefox or IE that displays the Web domain where
you are. This is a (small) measure to take against phishers, who display
the text "ebay.com" but then take you to centralasianscammer.com
or a raw IP address. Works well, but the sort of people who get hooked
by phishers are unlikely to be smart enough to double check their browser
location.

In researching firewalls for my book, I stumbled across Tiny
Personal Firewall, which has worked well so far, and has the advantage
of being free. If you don't already have a personal firewall, you need
one, or the worms'll getcha.

Those bums at Symantec are not renewing Norton AntiVirus 2001 update
subscriptions after the end of 2004, and NAV 2004 is a hideous mess.
(See the reviews on Amazon, and wear your asbestos bunny suit.) Looks
like, after using Norton continuously since 1992, I'm going to have
to move to something else.

I have gotten as far as March 2002 in adding named anchors to my archives,
and indexing photos. Slow work, but I'll get there.

August 24, 2004:

As you can see, I've been tinkering my format
a little. After a number of requests and suggestions, I decided to merge
the old VDM Diary archives with the Contra archives, since it was the
same me writing it, and mostly for the same reasons. It also serves to
remind me that I've been doing this for a long time, which helps sometimes
when I get discouraged and consider stopping.

In the meantime, some odd lots gathered over the last few days:

For the very first time, I
got an item on I Love Bacon. It's the (S)crapmasters dumpster, which
I photographed last year and posted in my September 13, 2003 entry.
That's not as good as getting Slashdotted, but it comes close.

Kyle McAbee's German co-workers took some time to explain that Wehrkirchen
(see my entry for August 21, 2004) were places of safety for villagers
and farmers during the unsettled times in Europe, especially during
the 30 Years' War and the incursions of the Turks into Eastern Europe.
They are by no means exclusively a German phenom and can be found in
many places from France to Bulgaria. The aristocracy had their castles;
the poor had their churches, which were often built from thick stone
on a hilltop and were thus easy to defend in the days before cannon.
It occurs to me that somebody could do a very nice coffee-table book
like The Wehrkirchen of Germany and write off the cost of a month's
tour of Europe. I'm busy right now but will somebody else please get
on it?

Wired has a
nice online piece about Ah-nold's surprising success as governor
of California, and why he may be a foretaste of the death of political
parties as we know them. As one who hates the whole idea of political
parties (and I like the term "radical center"!) I say, bring
it on!

August 23, 2004:

I guess it was inevitable: While glancing down
the list of search terms that led people to my Web site, (see my entries
for July 25 and August 11, 2004) I came across this one:

jeff duntemann may quote this
search on his weblog

Yes, I may, and I did. Point taken. Now stop it, already!

August 22, 2004:

I'm
heading into death march mode on Degunking Email, Spam, and Viruses,
and thus I need to marshall my time and energy a little and not post such
monster items here for a bit. Bear with me; I have a list of topics as long
as my arm but I gotta get some real work done. Web diaries are good, but
eating is even better.

August 21, 2004:

I
came to book publishing through magazines, and I still have a magazine
heart. I've always known that there's a magazine for every conceivable
obsession, but I confess I was jolted a little bit when Pete Albrecht
sent me a link to...New
Age Fortifications Magazine. (That's an English translation; the
mag is in Czech and published in the Czech Republic.) Everything for the
bunker freak. Bunker, as in reinforced concrete structures used to defend
towns and so on in wartime. See below.

Now,
bunkers are cool and an interesting piece of history, but I didn't expect
a whole culture to have risen around them. You can find bunker tours of
Europe, and if you're not in a position to go to Europe, you can take
a bunker tour online.

In the Niedersachsen (Lower Saxony) region of Germany, there's even something
called a Wehrkirche, or "fortified church," which is a church
built so that it can take a lot of punishment and beat back attackers. We
saw a couple while we were in Germany in 2002, including the
little church in my ancestral village of Schlarpe, which is a conventional
church added to a 13th century tower that clearly had more war than love
on its mind. Other similar churches are close by, in Schoningen
and Gierswalde.
Although there are a lot of mentions of Wehrkirchen on the Web, I have yet
to find a citation (at least in English) that explains why they came about.
All I can figure is that, during the religious upheaval of the 30 Years'
War, having a fortified church was probably the only way you could continue
to have a church at all.

August 20, 2004:

I have a hard time generating much enthusiasm
for the Olympics, and only some of that is my general indifference to
sports. The USOC, having trademarked the word "Olympics," will
harass anyone attempting to use "Olympics" or "Olympic"
in a name, including restaurants
and odd businesses with no implied or explicit reference to the Games.
The only thing they've (wisely) left alone is the Special Olympics, since
going after an event that benefits the mentally handicapped would probably
get their collective asses in a serious PR sling. (Remarkably, Congress
gave the USOC sweeping powers to seize basically all use of the terms
"Olympics," "Olympic," and "Olympiad" in
1987. And you guys wonder why I hate politics!)

I might even reluctantly grant them the trademark thing, but a new policy
at the 2004 games forbids athletes and support personnel from blogging
about their experiences at the games, or publishing (ever!) photos they
themselves have taken at the games, even of themselves. It is to boggle.

As you might expect, it's all about money. Since the Games are paid for
by licensing fees paid by broadcasters, anything that dilutes that information
monopoly is off the table. This is doubly ironic to me, since the athletes
themselves are nailed to a tree if they ever took a nickel in promos for
any sports-related work prior to competing in the Games. Jim Thorpe,
a stunning track star, was stripped of his medals at the 1912 Olympics
because he once made $25 a week playing minor league baseball while a
college student. (The IOC relented and reluctantly gave the medals back
in 1982, thirty years after poor Jim died, because of all the bad publicity
stirred up by Thorpe's daughter Grace.)

It's politically incorrect these days not to like sports, so I won't say
I don't like the Games themselves, or the poor athletes who work for zip
to make the sportscasters rich. I simply loathe the moneygrubbing, the hypocrisy,
and the out-of-control control freaks in the USOC and IOC who are ruining
what was intended to be (and still could be) a magnificent non-profit celebration
of human athletic prowess.

August 19, 2004:

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has
affirmed a lower court ruling in favor of Grokster and Morpheus, two
file-sharing utility vendors that Big Media has been trying to snuff.
The
surprisingly strong opinion basically reasserts a longstanding legal
principle: Persons who have no control over the use of their products
for copyright infringement cannot be held legally liable for that infringement.
Just as Xerox can't be sued when its copiers are used to infringe a print
copyright, so file sharing utilities like Grokster (and its host of brethren)
cannot be held liable for online infringement, since they have no way
to monitor or control the connections created between instances of their
software.

My view of this parallels that of the Ninth Circuit's: The technology
is too new to squash, especially since most of us in Small Media feel
that there really is a pony in there somewhere, and over the next few
years we may well find it. Small bands and small ebook publishers intuit
that the P2P mechanism can be used as a conduit for paid distribution
of content. The problem isn't with P2P networks themselves, but with the
machinery for accepting that payment. Small media definitely wants to
get paid; the difference between small media and big media, ironically
enough, is that small media is willing to accept some fraction of the
aggregate cover price of media actually distributed, and write the rest
off to PR/marketing, whereas Big Media refuses to let a penny of the amount
due go without a fight.

I met a number of ebook publishers at the recent Book Expo America show
who are selling completely DRM-free ebooks and making money (if not big
money) doing it. Making potential buyers aware of the product is the big
challenge, and P2P may have a role there. Of course, it may not; we just
don't know. It's far too soon to kill the technology, however, and the
lesson of videotapes (which were fiercely opposed by Big Media 25 years
ago) suggests that in time, Big Media may find a use for the technology
as well.

The story isn't over. Big Media may appeal the decision to the Supreme Court,
but in this case they may not, since a likely Supreme Court loss could set
a precedent that would last basically forever. Some say that the record
companies would prefer to wait a few more years, figuring that if the Republicans
continue to hold the White House and the Senate, the Supreme Court will
become more conservative (and thus more amenable to corporate concerns)
than the Court is now. We won't know until we get there, but in the meantime,
most of us are breathing a great sigh of relief.

August 18, 2004:

I left Princeton Mountain Hot Springs somewhat
reluctantly, with a conviction that I have got to find a few more of the
many hot springs here in Colorado. There are two that are reasonably close
to Colorado Springs, but both are nudist clubs, and I have my doubts as
to whether anybody would want to gaze on my undraped form. (Gotta work
on those abs, sigh.)

Anyway,
today we headed east from Salida on Highway 50, following the bed of the
young Arkansas River, and taking note of a possible swimming hole at Spikebuck,
one of the now-abandoned rail sidings where the National Forest people
have put restrooms and a boat ramp for river rafters. Spikebuck was the
sight of a 10-day shooting
war between the Santa Fe Railroad and the Denver and Rio Grande, way
back in 1880, when the two railroads had conflicting claims on who could
build the line up to the new mines at Leadville. The D&RG won the
court case, but not before there were numerous armed confrontations and
stone forts built to defend the construction beside the river. Nobody
got killed, but plenty of testosterone got sloshed around, and the railroad
was very busy for many years.

Today, that run of track only serves the tourist train that runs excursions
along the bottom of the Royal Gorge, a short but breathtakingly narrow
canyon cut by the Arkansas through the red granite strata here. We intend
to take that trip someday, but today we chose to sneak up the little-used
south entrance to the almost indescribable Royal
Gorge Bridge Park.

There
is a suspension bridge over the Royal Gorge, built 75 years ago to allow
cattle and rancher traffic across the gorge that would otherwise cut Teller
County mostly in two. It's the highest suspension bridge in the world,
fully 1083 feet above the Arkansas River. The bridge is the centerpiece
of a local amusement park owned and run by Cañon City. It has everything:
kiddie rides, restaurants, souvenir shops, a petting zoo, historical re-enactments,
a cable tram over the gorge, and a gonzo extreme ride in which they strap
you face-down into a stretcher hung from a cable and then pull you back
and launch you out over the nothingness of the gorge, 1100 feet above
the river. We heard people screaming as they were swinging over the gorge,
and for a moment I'm glad I'm 52 and wiser than that. 30 years ago I might
have been tempted.

We see TV commercials for the Royal Gorge Park all the time and it's been
on our list for awhile. I was a little surprised, however, at how tacky
the bridge itself is. It's a plank bridge, for crying out loud, and
there are occasional 2" gaps between the planks that allow you to look
straight down for over a thousand feet. The bridge itself looks like it's
made of chicken wire and Erector Set parts, and there is a noticeable swing
even in a modest breeze. Carol and I walked over it, a little apprehensively,
to have lunch and ride the carousel on the other side. After we walked back,
we did the crossing again, this time in the 4Runner. That was nerve-wracking
enough, but halfway across we had to swing hard right to miss an F-450 pickup
thundering toward us from the opposite side. The bridge is ostensibly 2
lanes wide, but they're lanes designed when people drove Model T's, not
monster pickup trucks. It was a squeaker, but we escaped without damage,
and took the rest of the drive home in relative ease. There's nothing like
a ticky-tacky bridge a thousand feet over river rapids to make four-lane
blacktop look good!

August 17, 2004:

Hot
damn! I have a new passion: Hot springs. We did the short run (30 miles)
south from Buena Vista today to Salida, and along the way we took a five-mile
jog out of the way to the Princeton
Mountain Hot Springs, a resort built around the springs on the edge
of Chalk Creek.

We didn't stay at the resort, which is small-town funky but quite cheap
($70-$90 a night) for the facilities, which include a 300-foot water slide
fed with warm springs water. For $8 you get a day pass to the hot springs,
and at right you can see me soaking my driving-sore butt in Chalk Creek.
What they've done is carefully arranged the boulders on the edge of the
creek, so that the 140° springs water mixes with the 59° creek
water in various proportions, providing very natural-looking 2-person
pools with water from the high 80s to the low 100s. The pool shown here
was at about 96°, which I consider about perfect for extended soaking.

I'm
not sure about the precise geology, but the water is bubbling up from
below, and when I dug the probe of my digital thermometer maybe 4"
down into the sand bottom of the pool, the temp reading shot up past the
instrument's upper limit of 120°. The water is crystal-clear and not
sulphurous at all, as I had feared. In fact, it has no odor at all, and
the treated drinking water tastes pretty good, with only a slight mineral
tang.

For people who don't want to sit in the creek, they have three pools,
one for laps, one for soaking in chlorinated spring water, and a third
higher up the hill for kid shenanigans, including a pretty awesome water
slide. As night fell this evening, Carol went up to the lap pool to do
some swimming, while I stayed in my boulder pool, lying on my back listening
to the creek, watching the bats come out and begin eating the airborne
insects, which (mercifully) did not appear to include mosquitoes. As it
got darker, a skinny preteen girl picked her way past my pool, looked
down at me and said, "Colorado rocks, doesn't it?"

Damn right.

August 16, 2004:

We
got as far as Buena Vista today as planned, in about two hours of driving
west on Highway 24, and caught a room at the Best Western. The rest of
the day we spent searching for Cottonwood Lake, a creek-dam lake in the
San Isabel National Forest.

We found the lake maybe half an hour before a thunderstorm rolled in,
hence the bad light in the photo at left. It's intended as a fishing lake
and a place of peace and quiet; only human-powered boats are allowed.
The water was 63°, which is on the low side of the envelope for swimming,
though I've been in much colder. We might even have tried it, as all necessary
gear was in the back of the 4Runner, but the lightning pouring out of
the sky gave us pause.

We're in the thick of the Rockies here, and there are probably more "fourteeners"
(mountains higher than 14,000 feet) visible from one place than anywhere
else in the continental US.

Which bring me to a question that occurred to me while gaping at the
mountains: Why does there appear to be a sort of 15,000 foot cutoff on
mountains here? Mt. Whitney (California) tops the list at 14,494 feet,
and there are no fewer than 73 fourteeners in the lower 48nearly
all of them in Colorado. (Not one in Montana!) One would think
there'd be a maverick sixteener and maybe two or three fifteeners, but
no: We have 73 mountains crowded up against a sort of rock ceiling. The
height distribution seems unlikely. Are there geological principles at
work here that I've never heard of?

Cripes, I have to slap myself soon or I'm going to be wanting a canoe.

August 15, 2004:

Carol and I are heading out for a quick 3-day
trip around central Colorado later today. Although I'm taking my X21 for
the sake of good notes, I don't intend to stress looking for Net access
in the middle of nowhere, and that means you'll probably real about the
whole thing ex post facto.

We're heading west from the Springs as far as Buena Vista, then heading
south to Salida, and from there over the Royal Gorge and past Cañon
City until we get back to the Springs. It's about a 240 mile loop, roughly
rectangular, and passing through some beautiful country. We've lived in
Colorado now since April 2003, and we've seen very little of the state.
Time to start fixing that. More as we go.

August 14, 2004:

Michael Covington promised to send me a detailed
response to my closing statement on faith and evidence, put forth in my
entry for August 2, 2004. As usual, he replied so brilliantly that I'll
quote (with his permission) the whole thing right here:

"Faith does not require evidence,
and evidence does not affect faith" strikes me as the kind of thing
people say when they are convinced their religion is false but they
want to cling to it anyway. It's the same logic as, "Yes, Virginia,
there is a Santa Claus" (i.e., there really isn't, but we want to keep
telling the story).

And of course this was a
major strand in mid-20th-century liberal Christianity, when people did
believe that their faith had been disproved, but (for a while) wanted
to cling to it anyway. Then a clearer-headed generation came along
and stopped going to church. That's why liberal Protestantism is dying
out.

In the Bible, "faith" means
"trust" or "loyalty." It does not mean "gullibility." When Thomas
asks Jesus for evidence, he gets it. Jesus also remarks, "Blessed are
those who have not seen, but have believed," which means, "Blessed are
those who never got this particular piece of evidence, but trusted me
on the weight of other evidence anyhow."

If faith isn't based on evidence,
what is it based on? I trust my wife. Is it because I don't
have any evidence to warrant the trust? On the contrary, it's because
I have lots of evidence. I trust Jesus for similar reasons.

Admittedly, the claims of
Christ can't be "proven" true by logic alone. Neither can the claims
of anyone else. A basic point of logic is that no evidence ever compels
a specific belief. You can always adopt auxiliary assumptions instead,
though they may have to be complex and bizarre. If you don't want to
believe in New York City, you can believe that the world is full of
fake maps and conspiracies. Your logic would be impeccable but your
belief would nonetheless be false.

But truth does not conflict
with truth. If Jesus is who the Church claims He is, then we need not
be afraid of any purported evidence to the contrary. Follow the evidence
bravely where it leads. Follow the weight of the evidence rather than
getting sidetracked by incidental difficulties. (This is just the way
science works, too. You can find incidental difficulties in everything.)

What Jesus asks for is not
mere assent to propositions, but a relationship of personal trust. It's
like the difference between believing that an airplane will fly, and
actually getting into it. Or like the difference between believing
that Melody loves me, and actually marrying her.

As best I can determine,
"fideism" (the notion that faith is contrary to reason, and that it
is meritorious to adopt a belief irrationally) is a 19th-20th-century
quirk (though the Catholic Encyclopedia tells me it has popped up in
earlier eras too). Sometimes it is derived from the Calvinistic notion
that our minds are so corrupted by sin that we cannot see the truth;
more often, nowadays, it's a cop-out for people who don't want to integrate
their faith with their non-religious knowledge and assumptions.

The historic Christian position
is that faith is rational; it consists of having the gumption to follow
the weight of the evidence where it leads, and not waver due to personal
difficulties or temptations. In the words of C. S. Lewis, "I am an
empirical theist."

Beautifully said, of course, but I don't think that what I hold is fideism
as you define it. As a Catholic, I put great store in sacramental systems
(of symbols, actions, words, and even rising smoke) that point to things
that are literally beyond evidence or human reason, even though they carry
the ring of truth for me. I don't feel that my faith is contrary to reason,
but that many of the things that I believe in transcend reason.
The Trinity is an excellent exampleyou can go nuts trying to work
it out rationally, but that doesn't mean it's absurd; in fact, it resonates
powerfully with me in ways I can't describe, which is a classic example
of the Catholic experience of faith. The evidence that supports Christianity
I certainly accept, but I don't want Christianity to hang solely
on evidence or reason.

What I really fear, and what the gist of that entry involves, is getting
in pissing contests with radical materialists over physical evidence or
lack thereof, which is a lot of what fuels the passion people hold for
things the The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail and The Da Vinci
Code. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, but those guys
never took Epistemology 101, and there's really no point in taking up
the argument with them. My faith begins with reason but doesn't end there,
which is precisely how I think faith should be, and the only way I know
how to experience it.

I just finished reading a book, The Inescapable Love of God by philospher/theologian
Thomas Talbott, that treats the whole subject of salvation from the standpoint
of reason, and does so without destroying the concept's sacramental impact.
I'll review it here when time allows; it was fantastic.

August 13, 2004:

Two upstream standards have been making news
in the last day or so: 802.11n and Blu-Ray
Disc (BD). 802.11n
is the next general Wi-Fi connection standard, aiming to meet or exceed
the throughput (not bitrate) of 100-Base T wired networks. Blu-Ray Disc
is a DVD recording standard that will fit 27 GB of data (!!) on a single
disc no larger than our current DVDs. Products based on both standards
are likely to hit stores by early 2006.

The story we watched as 802.11g unfolded is set to begin again. Anxious
to grab market share, network hardware vendors are preparing "pre-N"
designs that, especially at this early stage in the 802.11n standards
definition process, may or may not even remotely resemble the final standard.
(Note that they don't call it "draft-n"!) Belkin
is the first, but I'm sure engineers all over the world are bent over
their drafting tables, preparing the deluge.

This would seem madness, but only when you consider the balance between
what the gear will cost (under $200 street, and that's on Day 1) and what
it will do, well, people who need the speed will be able to justify the
money much more easily than in 1999 or 2000, when the newborn 802.11b
gear came in at $1000 or more. And when the final standard happens, the
early pre-N gear will be most of the way off the end of the depreciation
schedule, and the IT people will shove it down the food chain or give
it to their kids. Belkin will not lose money on this, nor will anyone
else who comes out with a pre-N design, no matter how much we bitch at
them for jumping the gun. We know so much about 802.11 microwave techniques
now that the designs can be created very cheaply. The basic modulation
method (Orthogonal
Frequency Division Multiplexing, or ODFM) is used in both 802.11a
and 802.11g and is no longer exotic.

It's kind of silly to ask if anybody really needs that kind of throughput.
One reason Esther Dyson always came off as a technoditz to me is that she
persisted in saying dopey things like, "Ordinary users will not need
the power of the 80286. We'll only see it in servers." A month or two
later, IBM came out with the 286-based PC AT. If throughput is cheap, people
will buy it, and we'll figure out what to do with it after the fact. 802.11n
is fast enough to stream HDTV, so there's one idea, and as I've mentioned
a time or two before, add massive throughput to massive storage, and you
get massive heartburn for Big Media. My popcorn bowl is standing by; it's
gonna be a helluva good show.

August 12, 2004:

Today's Wall Street Journal posted an
interesting short piece on the long-known but poorly internalized fact
that nothing posted on the Internet ever reliably goes away forever. People
are now googling prospective dates, new members in their churches, and
anyone else who comes into their lives. For most adults, who encountered
the Internet after (or like me, long after) coming to emotional
maturity, there's not a lot of concern. For young people these days who
have the tech savvy to field Web sites at age 13 while they're still cracking
booger jokes, there's a very real question of posting things that come
back to haunt them later on, as they apply to colleges or search for jobs.
I've stumbled across a couple of Web articles that were basically lip-smacking
over sexual conquests, and an awful lot of what passes for blog entries
these days are incoherent one-liners that don't say much about the writers'
intelligence, or else the sort of ranting, slobbering hatred that we tolerate
(and even encourage, in our modern culture) in the name of partisan politics.

I've probably posted more material on the Web (in terms of simple word
count, at least) than all but a handful of bloggers, and each time I write
an entry, I ask myself a couple of questions before I post it:

Would I be embarrassed to let my parents read this? (Yes, they're
both deceased, but the test remains useful.) I do believe in good taste,
and things like writing standards. Being gross is funny when you're
14, but ask yourself, how will it play 20 years later? It'll all still
be out there, somewhere.

Will this make me enemies? Enemies, after all, are a cost center;
friends are a revenue center. Broadband and Web hosting are costs enough,
as far as I'm concerned. I have occasional uncharitable thoughts. I
keep them to myself. After all, such thoughts are the least valuable
thoughts I (or you) will probably ever have.

Will I ever change my mind about this? I have notions and views that
I'm not confident in, which usually means that I'll change my mind about
them in the future. Changing my mind isn't a bad thing in itself, but
when I do, there's the problem of whether somebody's cache somewhere
has me preaching a position I no longer support. (This is one reason
I don't talk politics much, because my views have changed radically
over the years and continue to do so.)

Does a particular posting impute a position to me that I don't in
fact hold? There's always some risk in this due to people's differing
response to different topics. Some people think I'm a slobbering fundamentalist
because I talk about religion on a semiregular basis, but in fact I'm
a very liberal Catholic. (It's sad that quoting the Bible every couple
of months gets you branded as a religious fanatic by some.) Others think
I'm pro-piracy because I've talked about file sharing so much, but in
fact I'm pro-smalltime-artist, and see file sharing as a possible end-run
around monopolist Big Media. It's a subtle distinction, and much depends
on presentation: How you say something strongly influences how people
receive it. Read it twice, and ask what people will take away from
it. It may not always be what you think.

Since the invention of the printing press, publishing has been a mostly
permanent thing: No matter what you publish, a copy will probably continue
to exist somewhere. The difference today is that "somewhere" is
morphing to "everywhere," and recall of ancient data is becoming
increasingly effortless. The public "you" is no longer even mostly
under your control, and if you don't think about that from time to time,
you shouldand teach your children to as well. The booger jokes I've
told vanished into the playground air in 1965. The Web, on the other hand,
is forever.

August 11, 2004:

I continue to be fascinated by the logs I get
from my Web server, particularly the lists of search terms that people
were looking up when they clicked to my site. (See my entry for July 25,
2004.) So far August isn't quite as interesting as July was, but I got
a few gems of what we might call found search engine poetry:

One can almost feel the pain of some anonymous high school janitor somewhere,
trying to figure out how to get teen boys to flush their damned urinals.
And I for one would love to know how you flatten an etched wine bottle,
in Colorado or anywhere else. Maybe this is an early clue as to the hot
gift idea this Christmasbut hey, it's better than Billy the Big Mouth
Bass, no?

August 9, 2004:

Back
in Colorado Springsthough I'm way too pooped to provide a properly
interesting entry for today. I should be back in the saddle by tomorrow,
though there is a huge amount of catching up to be done.

August 8, 2004:

One of the problems with things like the notorious
"Rennes-le-Chateau" mystery is that some people are positively
ravenous for mystery, and tend to see mystery in anything that they simply
don't understand. The best example is the fuss that the authors of The
Holy Blood and the Holy Grail (and others writing elsewhere on the
topic) make over an inscription over the door of the church at Rennes.
(See my entries for August 2 & 3, 2004.) The Latin inscription is
Terribilis Est Locus Iste, which the authors translate far too
literally as "This Place Is Terrible." This is supposedly a
very mysterious thing to find on the wall of a Catholic church, but anybody
who thinks so hasn't done anything like due diligence on the issue.

First of all, "terribilis" doesn't mean "lousy" or
"bad," for example (as moderns would say) "The liverwurst
is terrible!" and the inscription does not mean (as certain
young moderns might say) "This place sucks." The word "terribilis"
here is much more subtle, and means "inspiring awe bordering on terror."
The phrase as a whole is from the Latin Vulgate version of Genesis 28:17,
in which Jacob wakes up from his very famous dream, realizing that he
is lying on sacred ground, and cries out, "How dreadful is this place!
This is the very house of God, the gateway of Heaven!" Anyone who
knew the Latin Vulgate at all would pick up on the reference, as would
anyone with a passing knowledge of the tradition of Catholic church buildings.
After a church is built it must be consecrated to God's use, and the Latin
Mass of church consecration begins with Genesis 28:17. It's a perfectly
reasonable thing to say about a church (especially in the 19th century)
and sheesh, those guys should have asked somebody who knew a little bit
about the Catholic sacramental tradition before seeing weirdness in the
wall carvings.

The church at Rennes seems perfectly reasonable to me, and not the least
bit mysterious, though I'm sure that modern atheists could think it grotesque.
There are plenty of real mysteries in the world. Let's not go making up
new ones from the whole cloth of our own ignorance.

August 6, 2004:

Still in Chicago, with minimal computer resources.
I'm definitely starting to miss broadband.

Anyway. I drove out to Lake Zurich, Illinois, this morning to see my
grade school friend Rich Maas, whom I have known since 1962 and with whom
I led the Fox Patrol in 6th, 7th, and 8th grades. Rich and his brother
Paul are partners in Screenflex,
which manufactures wheeled, roll-out partitions heavily used by churches
for quick-change reconfiguration of their common areas, say, for Sunday
School virtual classrooms that go back into a closet on Sunday afternoon.
(The Southern Baptists are their biggest customers.) They are a terrific
example of a small firm that had a good idea and are swimming against
the tide of outsourcing everything to China. Instead, they outsource their
TIG welding to a small firm in...Wisconsin. Everything else is done (with
American workers) right there in northern Illinois. First rate.

But what I wanted to comment on here is a strange shift in perception.
I grew up in Chicago, and back then, even after I had my own car, the
drive out to Lake Zurich (and Phil's Beach!) seemed forbidding, at
22 miles. When I jumped into the car at 10:00 this morning, I kept
thinking I should pack a lunch and a change of clothes. It's not that
there weren't roads or Interstates when I used to live here (I'm not that
old!) but simply that in the 60s and 70s, my sense of scale was completely
different. I lived virtually my entire life within seven or eight miles
of my little house on Clarence Avenue in the city. Carol's house was 3.2
miles up Harlem Avenue, and even that seemed a bit of a schlep. Going
down to DePaul University (about eight miles) was a major haul. Going
anywhere farther required some meditation and detailed logistical planning,
with maybe a box of Triscuits beside me on the seat of the Chevelle.

All different now. Phoenix is more or less LA without an ocean, and we
traversed its vastness without much thought, mostly because we had to.
My "easy" commute was 14 miles one way. Our Old Catholic parish
was 26 miles off, down in the center of Phoenix. For awhile, the closest
grocery store was nine miles south of us, and when they put in a new Safeway
a mere six miles south, it was nirvana. (Shortly before we moved, a new
retail complex plopped yet another Safeway only 1.8 miles away, and it
felt weird somehow, like the milk and bananas weren't real if we didn't
have to drive for at least ten minutes to get them.) This morning, it
seemed like I took a couple of turns, listened to a few country western
songs on 99.5 FM, and shazam! I was there.

Maybe this isn't a good thing. Lord knows I do more driving now than I ever
did as a Chicagoan. On the other hand, I was looking around as I drove,
and realizing that I had never seen much of Chicago's outer metro fringes,
even though I lived here 27 years. I had left my city long before I ever
really got to know it. Sure, it's a tradeoff. What isn't?

August 4, 2004:

Pete
Albrecht sent me a pointer to what I guess you might call a
Swiss Army Flash Drive. It's by Swissbit,
and, yes, is actually made in Switzerland. I don't know whether or not
the 128 MB pocketknife is a good idea, but as a geek tool it has almost
mythical presence. Perhaps more practical, if not so mythic, is their
standalone USB drive that folds into its plastic sheath like a pocketknife
blade into its handle. This would be useful: The problem I'm having with
my current SanDisk Cruzer Minis is that the snap-off protected caps are
easy to lose. (I had originally wondered why each drive came with three.
Now I know.)

What I think would really fly off the shelves into every geek's pocket
would be a spring-loaded 1 GB USB flash drive that would flip out of its
sheath when you press a button. Yup. A switchdrive. If you spot one, please
let me know.

August 3, 2004:

Relevant to yesterday's entry is Paul
Smith's site debunking (sheesh, I almost wrote "degunking")
the Priory of Sion, which is the shadowy organization supposedly guarding
the descendents of Jesus Christ and hoping to create a sort of unified
Kingdom of Europe with one of Jesus' descendents as king. Having read
all the Holy Blood and Holy Grail materials I could find back in
the late 1980s, I was interested in the flipside. Unfortunately, the flipside
was as confusing as the original number, and faced with contentions and
counter contentions from strange greasy eminences and shadowy secret societies,
I realized that what you think about the whole Da Vinci Code business
is as much a matter of faith as Christianity itself. Most of the original
documents are lost, or stolen, or forged, or never existed to begin with,
depending on whom you talk to. The mountain of detail stacked both for
and against is so immense that it would take a lifetime to read the (available)
source documents and try to divine your own position somewhere within
the mess. (Yeah. "Divine." There's that word again.)

So my problem with faith and evidence continues, and Michael Covington has
promised to weigh in with his considerable wisdom, which I will summarize
here. I just re-read The Messianic Legacy, which is in a sense the
notes and back-story to both The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail and
The Da Vinci Code. It's actually the best of that whole canon, however
loopy you perceive it to be, and has some interesting things to say about
human psychology. I'll review it in detail once I get back home.

August 2, 2004:

I'm surprised that so few people know that The
Da Vinci Code is basically a dumbed-down fictional cover of The
Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, a very popular 1982 book by Michael
Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln. HBHG focused on the Rennes
de Chateau mystery, which involved ancient parchments sealed in the altar
of an old French church, the Knights Templar, and all sorts of skullduggery
going back to the time of the Crusades and before.

It all involved some sort of secret that could potentially change the
world, a secret that was handed down by the Merovingian kings of France,
those fingers-in-every-pie Templars, and a shadowy organization called
the Priory of Sion. The "secret" might have been explosive in
earlier centuries, but in these jaded times it's just more Weekly World
News stuff: Jesus Christ supposedly married Mary Magdalen and had
kids, and their descendents are still among us, waiting (apparently) for
us to hand the world over to their governance.

HBHG was engaging reading, especially for some of the historical sidenotes,
and it precipitated a whole industry of books, TV specials, maps, tours,
and who knows what else, nearly all of which has already been forgotten.
I read most of the stuff I could lay hands on, but the more I read, the
thinner the historical detail got and the more the material vaulted into
the absurd. For example, The Tomb of God by Richard Andrews and
Paul Shellenberger insisted that the Templars discovered the mummified
body of Christ under their namesake Temple in Jerusalem, and brought it
back to France, where they buried it in a crypt beneath Mt. Cardou. (Makes
sense, no? "The body of God." "Corps de dieux." "Cardou.")

If The Da Vinci Code has any value at all, it lies in provoking
discussion about whether and how information about the Jesus of history
impacts the Jesus of the Christian tradition, as laid out in the Bible,
the Christian creeds, and the writings of the Church fathers. We have
admittedly learned a lot in recent years about the Holy Land in the early
centuries of the Christian era, especially about the fringe sects within
Judaism like the Essenes and the Nazareans. What we don't have much of
are verifiable sources outside the Christian sphere, especially from Greek
and Roman historians. For all the fuss that Jesus caused, there is almost
nothing in recorded Roman history about him. Supposedly Jesus incited
a riot in the Jewish Temple that took a significant detachment of Roman
soldiers to quell, an event that was the proximal cause of his executionbut
the Roman records say nothing at all about it.

Many therefore say that if contemporary secular records don't support
Jesus' high-profile life and death or even his existence, we have no reason
to believe in Christianity at all. Such people misunderstand the purpose
of religious faith: to give meaning (and healing) to human life and provide
a way, however tenuous, to get our hands around and give shape to our
intuitions about immortality and the nature of the human soul. We will
probably never have any good objective (that is, non-scriptural) data
about Jesus' life, but that's not germane to the Christian story, because
at the core of the Christian story are purely spiritual and fundamentally
non-evidential realities: Christ's divinity, the redemption of collective
humanity from its failings, and the eternal destiny of individual human
souls, nothing of which is touched on by objective, physical history.
Christianity as we have received it is not a consequence of verifiable
historical events, but of God's ineffable actions within this world and
elsewhere, and you either believe in that or you don't. To search for
a historical Jesus is to put blinders on and miss a very big picture that
goes well beyond the Earth. Why people bother is a mystery to me. Faith
does not require evidence, and evidence does not affect faith.

Time for supper. More on this general topic later.

August 1, 2004:

I'm in Chicago, and I don't have broadbandso
I haven't been able to spend my accustomed hour or so a day, poking around
the Web, looking for interesting things. That may make Contra a little
duller for the next few days, though it may also make me try a little
harder. I have some odd notes on various things on disk, and I'm reading
an interesting book. Maybe I can present something interesting without
a lot of Web involvement.

One piece of good news is that my experiment with using Flash drives
instead of Zip drives for removable storage has so far been a smashing
success. (See my entry for May
11, 2004.) My two most-used Zip cartridges (for my Web presence and
my current book project) have been demoted to backup storage for a pair
of 256 MB SanDisk Cruser Mini Flash drives. They're about as fast as Zip
cartridges, which is more than fast enough for storing documents and modest-sized
graphics. Best of all, every Windows XP and 2000 machine made in the last
six or seven years is instantly Flash-drive ready, without any need for
installing drivers and doing any fiddling of the OS. You plug 'em in,
and Windows recognizes them as "disk" drives instantly.

The 256 MB units I favor cost about $60 in stores, and you can find them
for as little as $52 or so if you shop hard online. That's a lot more than
a Zip 250 cartridge, but I don't mind. They work in all my machines, and
I don't have to fret the dreaded Click of Death that has devoured six or
seven of my 250 MB cartridges over the past two years. I won't have to pay
for any more Zip drives in any future machines, so as the price on Flash
drives comes down, the true cost won't be a great deal more than a Zip 250
cartridge. One great unknown is whether these things have a lifespan. Do
they fail, and how often, and why? I suspect they're too new for good data
on that score, but we'll see. I back them up religiously, and if they fail,
well, I won't lose muchexcept faith in what has so far been a marvelous
removable medium.